Editor’s Note: Sometimes films can be a total mess — and sometimes they can be beautiful mess. Freeline Media’s newest critic, Milan Paurich, thinks that designation applies perfectly to David O. Russell’s film Silver Linings Playbook. Read on!

By Milan Paurich

The Beautiful Mess of Silver Linings Playbook  

There are films that announce their importance with grave solemnity, and others that sneak up on you by being so alive that, years later, you realize they’ve become part of your DNA. David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook belongs emphatically in the second category. It arrived in November 2012 looking like just another awards-season dramedy — one of those movies about “difficult” people learning valuable life lessons — and then, almost imperceptibly, it becomes something considerably rarer: a gloriously messy American romantic comedy that earns every emotional high by refusing to tidy away the chaos that makes its characters worth loving in the first place.

It’s one of those pictures that seems to improve with every viewing because you stop paying attention to the plot and start luxuriating in the texture of the performances. The film isn’t really about bipolar disorder, or grief, or football superstitions or ballroom dancing. It’s about people who feel everything too intensely trying to find someone who can survive the stormy weather inside them.

That might sound sentimental, but Russell never allows it to become remotely mawkish. He’s always been fascinated by families that communicate as though every conversation is an emergency. From the startling mother/son dynamics of Spanking the Monkey through the anarchic brilliance of Flirting with Disaster, the combustible G.I. camaraderie of Three Kings, the exhilarating philosophical circus of I Heart Huckabees and the unexpectedly muscular classicism of The Fighter, Russell has consistently preferred emotional collisions to neat psychological explanations. His characters interrupt one another because they can’t wait to live. They don’t arrive carrying tidy backstories; they explode onto the screen trailing unresolved arguments. Silver Linings Playbook was the moment when all of those instincts found their ideal form. Russell doesn’t smooth out the rough edges; he simply discovers that they’re capable of extraordinary tenderness.

The premise sounds almost engineered to produce a respectable “issue movie.” Pat Solitano has been released from a psychiatric hospital after a nervous breakdown. He’s determined to win back the wife whose infidelity precipitated his collapse despite restraining orders, family skepticism and reality itself. Then he meets Tiffany, a young widow with a spectacular talent for making social situations awkward. They strike a bargain involving a dance competition, mutual emotional blackmail and, eventually, something much more frightening than love: honesty. On paper it sounds implausible; on screen it feels inevitable.

Russell’s greatest gift as a director may be his refusal to treat instability as a collection of symptoms. Hollywood has always loved reducing mental illness to either inspirational uplift or dangerous unpredictability. Russell does neither. His characters aren’t diagnoses searching for redemption. They’re recognizably contradictory people whose illnesses complicate lives that were already complicated to begin with. The movie is funny not because anyone is bipolar or depressed, but because human beings are inherently ridiculous when they’re trying desperately to be understood. That distinction matters.

Bradley Cooper was already a movie star before Silver Linings. The Hangover made him the handsome rogue every studio wanted to build a franchise around. He possessed movie-star confidence almost to a fault. If there was a recurring limitation in his early performances, it was that he often seemed to know he was the coolest person in every room. Pat Solitano changes everything.

For perhaps the first time, Cooper allows audiences to see someone who can’t hide behind charm because charm has deserted him. Pat is handsome without realizing it, intelligent without discipline, hopeful without perspective. He’s painfully transparent. Every disappointment registers immediately across his face before he can construct the reassuring smile we’ve come to expect from leading men. It’s a remarkably brave performance because Cooper allows himself to appear frightened.

Movie stars often mistake vulnerability for weakness. Cooper discovers precisely the opposite. His openness makes him infinitely more attractive than any amount of swagger ever could. Instead of wondering whether Pat will get the girl, we find ourselves hoping he’ll simply make it through breakfast without imploding. The transformation isn’t cosmetic but foundational. The Hangover made Bradley Cooper famous; Russell’s movie revealed the hidden depth that would sustain a career.

Jennifer Lawrence, meanwhile, performs one of those miracles that arrives perhaps once every decade.

Watching her Tiffany Maxwell is like watching weather. She doesn’t so much enter scenes as alter the atmospheric pressure inside them. Lawrence possessed extraordinary confidence before this picture (Winter’s Bone had already established her dramatic chops), but Tiffany is something else entirely. She isn’t merely wounded or funny or sexy or reckless. She’s all of those things simultaneously, often within the same sentence.

Young actors sometimes mistake unpredictability for randomness. Lawrence understands rhythm too well for that. Her Tiffany continually surprises us, yet every surprise feels emotionally inevitable. She’s flirtatious because she’s lonely, cruel because she’s terrified and funny because humor is the only language she’s found that doesn’t require self-protection. Lawrence never asks us to admire Tiffany’s damage; she asks us to recognize it. That’s infinitely more difficult.

It’s also one of the great comic performances of the 21st century because Lawrence refuses to signal where the laughs are supposed to be. Tiffany’s bluntness isn’t a collection of punch lines. It’s simply the way someone behaves after grief has stripped away the social niceties everyone else mistakes for civility. Her chemistry with Cooper is astonishing because neither actor appears interested in chemistry. They aren’t “performing” attraction. They’re discovering, scene by scene, that another person might finally understand the strange frequency on which they both happen to operate. Romantic comedies usually depend upon opposites attracting. This one depends upon equals recognizing one another.

Robert De Niro deserves enormous credit for understanding precisely what kind of film he’s in. By the time this movie appeared, De Niro had spent years wandering through broad comedies and uninspired thrillers, his effortless authority increasingly taken for granted. Here Russell reminds us that De Niro’s greatest strength has never been intimidation, it’s listening.

His Pat Sr. is a man who expresses affection through football rituals, household routines and superstitious nonsense because direct emotional communication remains beyond his vocabulary. Although he loves his son ferociously, he simply lacks the tools to show it.

Jacki Weaver performs miracles with stillness, and a wonderfully relaxed Chris Tucker supplies warmth without stealing focus. Even the Philadelphia setting becomes another member of the family:  loud, brash, affectionate, irrational, forever arguing because argument is simply another language for love.

Russell shoots conversations the way great jazz musicians improvise. Interruptions become melodies, people drift in and out of frame, voices overlap. The camera rarely behaves as though it already knows where the emotional emphasis belongs. Instead it discovers moments almost accidentally, allowing the actors to surprise one another. Some critics dismissed this looseness as sloppiness, but they were wrong. The looseness is the style.

Life rarely provides clean dramatic beats. Russell trusts his audience to locate meaning amid apparent disorder.

Perhaps the movie’s boldest achievement is that it refuses to apologize for happiness. Contemporary prestige

pictures often behave as though optimism must be carefully rationed out lest anyone mistake sincerity for naïveté. Russell has no patience for that fashionable pessimism. The dance competition finale walks an extraordinary tightrope. It’s simultaneously ridiculous, suspenseful, hilarious and deeply moving.

Nobody becomes a great dancer overnight, nobody is magically “cured” and nobody’s life makes perfect sense. Yet everything important changes. That’s because the dance isn’t about technical excellence, it’s about two people discovering they can trust another human being enough to look foolish together. There may not be a more romantic idea in modern American cinema.

The title itself turns out to be more profound than it first appears. Most films promise silver linings as a reward waiting beyond the suffering. Russell proposes something subtler. His “silver lining” isn’t the elimination of pain, it’s finding someone willing to share it. That could explain why the picture has aged so beautifully.

Many celebrated movies from the early 2010’s now feel trapped inside the prestige formulas of their moment. This doesn’t. It remains gloriously untidy, emotionally excessive, defiantly uncool. It believes people can improve without becoming different people. That’s a radical form of optimism that also happens to be true.

The finest popular American films have always hidden surprising emotional complexity inside accessible entertainment. Think of Preston Sturges, Hal Ashby or James L. Brooks at his best. They understood that audiences will follow almost any emotional risk if the director first persuades them they’re in capable hands.

Russell joins that company here. He gives us a movie that laughs loudly, loves fiercely and refuses to apologize for either impulse. Every scene vibrates with the possibility that someone might say exactly the wrong thing (or exactly the right one). The difference is often only a heartbeat.

Great films rarely solve life’s mysteries, they illuminate them. Silver Linings Playbook illuminates something essential about the fragile negotiations that constitute intimacy. Love doesn’t arrive after we’ve repaired ourselves. It arrives while we’re still under construction, carrying our anxieties, compulsions, embarrassments and impossible hopes into someone else’s equally unfinished life. That’s why it lingers. Not because Russell flatters us with fantasies of perfection, but because he recognizes the beautiful mess we’ve been all along.

Movie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan  ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades:  at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/